Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about Streetsblog Network

With a few exceptions, the five-year transportation bill heading to President Obama’s desk continues what has been the core function of federal transportation policy for more than 60 years — sending a ton of money to the states to spend on highways. Preventing a big step backward was about as much as you could hope […]

Sharrows: the consolation prize of bike infrastructure. Dick van Veen, a Dutch bike engineer who is currently working in Ottawa, says cyclists often ask him about this symbolic gesture toward bike safety. He says in America, sharrows are often painted on an otherwise inhospitable road. The Dutch use them too, but they have a very different approach, he explains at Urban […]

The deaths of two pedestrians and bicyclist in quick succession in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood have local street safety advocates demanding reforms and the mayor promising swift action. So naturally a crack reporter had to interject that, hey, pedestrians sometimes break traffic rules! A recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece by Ed Blazina adopts the perspective of a Port Authority bus driver who complains people on […]

Traffic fatalities are on the rise up again, with an increase of 8.1 percent in the first half of 2015, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. As is their practice, NHTSA officials are attributing the problem to driver (or passenger) error — drunk driving, speeding, failure to wear seatbelts — but did promise “new initiatives to protect vulnerable road users such […]

Anyone who does a fair amount of walking to get around will encounter gaps in the pedestrian network sooner or later. Sometimes they might just be minor annoyances, but they can also put people in very dangerous positions. Clark Parker at Streets.mn stumbled into a pedestrian gap when he tried to send a letter on a Saturday afternoon. The only post office open […]

Transportation planners in Austin are in the beginning stages of a pattern just about every community in the U.S. is familiar with. The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (CTRMA) says traffic on a local highway — South MoPac — is going to grow a lot. And if Austin doesn’t spend $400 million building new managed lanes, they […]